Latest news with #Leavitt
Yahoo
a day ago
- General
- Yahoo
Trump's Press Secretary Tried To Diss Harvard, But Accidentally Made People Question Her Public Speaking Skills Instead
The White House press secretary holds one of the most public-facing roles in a presidential cabinet. Right now, that role is held by 27-year-old Karoline Leavitt. Amid the Trump administration's ongoing legal and cultural battle with Harvard University over the federal funding it receives, Leavitt appeared on Fox News to discuss the situation with Sean Hannity. President Trump is moving to cancel all of the university's federal funding. In a clip that's been viewed over 4.6 million times, Leavitt attempts to diss Harvard as a "woke" leftist institution of higher education (the oldest and most revered in the country, I might add). She says that President Donald Trump is "more interested in giving that taxpayer money to trade schools and programs and state schools where they are promoting American values, but most importantly, educating the next generation based on skills that we need in our economy and our society." Leavitt then slips up: "Apprentinships, electricians, plumbers." Did you catch that? She meant "apprenticeships." Related: 18 Major Global Events That American Media Is Ignoring Right Now, And Why They Actually Matter To Us "We need more of those in our country and less LGBTQ graduate majors from Harvard University, and that's what this administration's position is," she says. Leavitt concludes, "And we also are not gonna tolerate the illegal criminal antisemitic behavior that we saw take place at Harvard and many other college campuses across the country," referencing the wave of pro-Palestine protests and calls for colleges to divest from Israel. If you're wondering what on earth an "LGBTQ graduate major" is, I'm right there with you. People who saw the clip on Twitter felt the same way. "Beyond parody," a Republicans against Trump account posted. Related: "MAGAs Are The Dumbest People On This Planet": 26 Tweets About The Sad State Of Politics This Week Another person pointed out Leavitt's linguistic slip. "Rule #1: if you're going to try to make the case that we need less formal education in this country, make sure you don't say, 'apprentinships' when you mean to say 'apprenticeships'. Thank you," they wrote. Some people joked about Trump and his cabinet shirking off their college-educated lawyers... ...and doctors. Other people took it a little more seriously. "This is a culture war soundbite designed to inflame, not inform," this person wrote. "Devaluing scholars, because they are LGBTQ, reveals more about Leavitt's insecurity than our educational priorities." "Just wait till she finds out that electricians and plumbers can be TOO!!!!!" someone wrote. Of course, some people were in support of Leavitt's comments. But a whooooole lot weren't. You can watch the full clip here. Leavitt: "Electricians, plumbers -- we need more of those in our country, and less LGBTQ graduate majors from Harvard University. And that's what this administration's position is." — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 28, 2025 @atrupar / Fox / X / Via What do you think? Let us know in the comments. Also in In the News: An Ad Against Far-Right Voters Is Going Viral For Being Both Terrifying And (Kinda) Accurate Also in In the News: Miss USA's 2024 "National Costume" Has Been Revealed, And It's Obviously An Interesting Choice Also in In the News: One Body Language Expert Spotted Something Very Telling When Donald Trump "Held His Own Hand" At His Recent Press Conference
Yahoo
a day ago
- Health
- Yahoo
The AI Slop Scandal Around the MAHA Report Is Getting Worse
It came to light this week that a new government report from the "Make America Healthy Again" Commission led by Robert F Kennedy Jr. contained botched citations for scientific papers that didn't exist. This is almost certainly a sign that some form of generative AI was involved to draft a very consequential piece of medical agenda-setting, coming out of the US's top health agency, the Department of Health and Human Services. Now, some additional reporting suggests that the paper's flaws go even deeper — yes, even deeper than allegedly relying on a technology known for making stuff up and then being surprised that it made stuff up. But first, let's highlight how the White House finally decided to respond to the criticism of the report, which has been "very poorly and not convincingly at all." On Thursday, the White House said that it would fix the errors in the government report — and it did, releasing a new version with corrected citations. But press secretary Karoline Leavitt also took the opportunity to construe the affair as the press getting worked up about a few errant typos. "I understand there was some formatting issues with the MAHA report that are being addressed and the report will be updated," Leavitt told reporters during a press briefing, as quoted by the Associated Press. "But it does not negate the substance of the report." "Minor citation and formatting errors have been corrected," HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon told the AP in a statement. Led by noted anti-vaxxer and all-around crackpot RKF Jr., the "MAHA Report" purports to be a tell-all on why Americans, and especially children, are so unhealthy. Both Leavitt and Nixon described the report as "transformative." That's a questionable claim. As NOTUS first reported on Thursday, several of the studies cited in the report do not exist at all, including one called "Overprescribing of Oral Corticosteroids for Children With Asthma," which was used to argue that doctors are giving kids too much medicine. This "study" has never been referenced anywhere outside the MAHA report. Lawyers have been sanctioned for similar behavior in court. It gets dumber. The Washington Post found that 37 of the paper's 522 footnotes are inexplicably repeated multiple times. Some of the citations also include an "oaicite" appended to the URLs, which refers to OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. This is a "definitive sign" that the research was gathered using an AI, WaPo concluded. And the flaws go beyond bogus citations, or "minor" perils of "formatting," in Leavitt's parlance. As experts told the NYT, some of the papers that were correctly cited were still inaccurately summarized — if in fact they weren't being deliberately misconstrued. The report argued, in one case, that a 40-fold increase in bipolar disorder and ADHD diagnoses in children between 1994 to 2003 was propelled by loosened criteria in a fifth edition of a guide used by psychiatrists, per the NYT. But that fifth edition, it turns out, didn't come out until 2013. And that "40-fold increase" the report touted appears to come from a 2007 study which makes zero mention of an uptick in ADHD. Even if you could somehow excuse using an AI chatbot to help speed up composing what's supposed to be the cynosure of the US's public health policy going forward, the sheer levels of sloppiness on display can only leave you to conclude that either RFK and his lackeys have no idea what they're doing and have no business writing a serious scientific document, or that they're trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the American public, cynical enough to ask an AI model to conjure up studies to fit whatever narrative they're peddling. "This is not an evidence-based report, and for all practical purposes, it should be junked at this point," Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, told WaPo. "It cannot be used for any policymaking. It cannot even be used for any serious discussion, because you can't believe what's in it." More on AI: This Sleazy GLP-1 Prescription Site Is Using Deepfaked "Before-and-After" Photos of Fake Patients, and Running Ads Showing AI-Generated Ozempic Boxes
AFP
a day ago
- Health
- AFP
'Make America Healthy Again' report cites nonexistent studies: authors
The highly anticipated "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) report was released on May 22 by the presidential commission tasked with assessing drivers of childhood chronic disease. But it included broken citation links and credits authors with papers they say they did not write. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt downplayed the errors as "formatting issues" during a press briefing on May 29 (archived here). "It does not negate the substance of the report," said Leavitt, who expressed confidence in Kennedy and his team, and insisted their work was "backed on good science." Image White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt takes questions during the daily briefing at the White House in Washington, DC, on May 29, 2025 (AFP / Jim WATSON) The issues were first reported May 29 by NOTUS (archived here), a US digital news website affiliated with the nonprofit Allbritton Journalism Institute. Noah Kreski (archived here), a Columbia University researcher listed as an author of a paper on adolescent anxiety and depression during the Covid-19 pandemic, told AFP the citation is "not one of our studies" and "doesn't appear to be a study that exists at all." The citation included a link (archived here) that purported to send users to an article in the peer-reviewed medical journal JAMA Pediatrics, but it was broken. Jim Michalski, a spokesman for the JAMA Network (archived here), said it "was not published in JAMA Pediatrics or in any JAMA Network journal." Columbia University epidemiologist Katherine Keyes (archived here), who was also listed as an author of the supposed JAMA study, told AFP she does research on the topic but does not know where the statistics credited to her came from, and that she "did not write that paper." She expressed concern about the error saying: "Citation practices are an important part of conducting and reporting rigorous science." She said she would be happy to send her actual research on depressive symptoms in adolescents and young adults "to the MAHA committee to correct the report, although I have not yet received information on where to reach them." Guohua Li, another Columbia University professor named in the citation (archived here), said the reference is "totally fabricated" and that he does not even know Kreski. AFP also spoke with Harold Farber, a pediatrics professor at Baylor College of Medicine (archived here), who said the paper attributed to him "does not exist" nor had he ever collaborated with the co-authors credited in the MAHA report. Similarly, Brian McNeill, spokesperson for Virginia Commonwealth University, confirmed that professor Robert Findling (archived here) did not author a paper the report says he wrote about advertising of psychotropic medications for youth. A fourth paper on ADHD medication was also not published in the journal Pediatrics in 2008 as claimed in the MAHA report, according to the journal's publisher, the American Academy of Pediatrics. A keyword search reveals a blog post with the same title as the purported paper, "Direct-to-consumer advertising and the rise in ADHD medication use among children" but it has a different author and is not a peer-reviewed publication (archived here). The Democratic National Committee blasted the report as "rife with misinformation" in a May 29 press release, saying Kennedy's agency "is justifying its policy priorities with studies and sources that do not exist" (archived here). Citations edited The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) declined to comment, referring AFP's questions to the White House. At her briefing, Leavitt declined to answer how the report was produced and whether artificial intelligence tools may have been used to craft it, directing those questions back to HHS. t reported its analysis of the citations showed "oaicite" was attached to the URLs, the presence of which indicates the use of artificial intelligence products from OpenAI (archived here). Within hours of the briefing, an edited version of the report replaced the original paper on the White House website (archived here). Changes are not flagged or marked as corrections, but the four citations investigated by AFP were replaced with working links. The modifications are as follows: The paper said to come from the team at Columbia University was swapped out for a reference to a briefing on the Teen National Health Interview Survey published by KFF (archived here). The nonexistent paper credited to Farber was replaced with a paper on oral corticosteroid medication prescribed for asthma he published in Pediatrics in 2017 (archived here). An article published in the journal Psychiatric Services in 2006 replaced the paper initially credited to Findling (archived here). The reference to a paper on ADHD medication advertising was supplanted by a 2013 article from The New York Times (archived here) Concerns about Kennedy The revelations about the MAHA study came just a day after Kennedy attacked major medical journals, accusing them of collaborating with the pharmaceutical industry and threatening to bar government scientists from publishing in them. Kennedy was approved as health secretary earlier this year despite widespread alarm from the medical community over his history of promoting vaccine misinformation and denying scientific facts. Since taking office, he has ordered the National Institutes of Health to probe the causes of autism -- a condition he has long falsely tied to the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. The report's chronic disease references appear to nod to that same disproven theory, discredited by numerous studies since the idea first aired in a late 1990s paper based on falsified data. It also criticizes the "over-medicalization" of children, citing surging prescriptions of psychiatric drugs and antibiotics, and blaming "corporate capture" for skewing scientific research. Image US Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) (L) look on as Director of the National Institutes of Health Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya holds up a copy of a MAHA health report during a MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) Commission Event in the White House in Washington, DC, on May 22, 2025. A White House report detailing Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s priorities devotes sizable space to stoking fear about vaccines -- even as it tackles more grounded worries over chemicals and diet. (AFP / Jim WATSON) Read more of AFP's reporting on health misinformation here. Gwen Roley and Manon Jacob contributed reporting to this article.
Gulf Today
a day ago
- Politics
- Gulf Today
Karoline Leavitt lashes out at judges blocking Trump orders
John Bowden, The Independent The White House ramped up its fury at federal judges Thursday after the latest move by a three-judge panel this week to block Donald Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs infuriated officials up and down the administration. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt came to the briefing room podium already breathless as she vowed that the Trump administration would take Wednesday's ruling "to the Supreme Court," delivering a minutes-long, impassioned screed about the unprecedented rate at which Donald Trump's second presidency has been rebuffed by the Judicial Branch. The press secretary went on to note that in February, Trump's first full month in office, he was blocked from taking executive action more times than his predecessor was "in three years". But her comments bely an obvious counter-argument: that the Trump administration's unprecedented usage and scope of executive actions is itself to blame for its sky-high rate of failure at the district court level. And it's not as if district court judges are alone on an island in this regard. Despite having appointed three of the nine sitting Supreme Court justices, Trump has already seen defeat after defeat at the nation's highest court less than six months into his second term. Most recently, the Supreme Court blocked his administration from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport migrants, potentially the clearest example of how the second Trump administration has relied on unconventional to outright brazenly defiant legal tactics to defend the actions of the president and his team in court. A federal district court also halted Trump's outright ban on student visas for international students seeking to go to Harvard, the nation's oldest institution of higher learning, as the White House wages a one-sided ideological war on the school. Still, administration officials are waging war on the judiciary, labeling even conservative judges as "activist" if they rule against Trump. "There is a troubling and dangerous trend of unelected judges inserting themselves into the presidential decision making process," Leavitt said from the podium in her opening remarks Thursday. "America cannot function if President Trump, or any other president, for that matter, has their sensitive diplomatic or trade negotiations railroaded by activist judges. "These judges are threatening to undermine the credibility of the United States on the world stage," Leavitt accused, going on to say America's jurists "brazenly abuse their judicial power to usurp the authority of President Trump." She insisted that the court system risked turning America into a non-functioning country if judges continue to refuse to let the president have his way. News broke hours after Leavitt's briefing of a federal appeals court panel temporarily staying the lower court's ruling against Trump on tariffs. But at a press conference later in the afternoon, tensions were still high. White House trade adviser Peter Navarro lashed out at a reporter for The Independent, Andrew Feinberg, for asking about the frequency with which the administration attacks judges as "activists" when the president or his officials disagree with their rulings. "Who is this guy?" the hair-trigger Navarro railed, evading the question in the process. Leavitt's comments also conveniently ignore the fact that the Trump administration has been resisting repeated orders by judges, including those from the Supreme Court, to "facilitate" the return of a man whom the Justice Department's own attorneys have admitted was deported in violation of a judge's order prohibiting him from being sent to his home country. Top administration officials have challenged the order of the lower court, arguing that judges do not have the power to dictate American foreign policy under the Constitution and arguing that the man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, is no longer legally the administration's burden. Stephen Miller, architect of the administration's mass deportation plans, also argued on Thursday that the US was facing a "judicial coup" and warned that "it is the end of democracy" if courts to not stop halting individual orders issued by the Trump administration. It is the end of democracy if not reversed.
Yahoo
a day ago
- General
- Yahoo
Over 4 Million People Have Watched Karoline Leavitt Say We Need Electricians Instead Of "LGBTQ Graduate Majors" From Harvard, Whatever That Means
The White House press secretary holds one of the most public-facing roles in a presidential cabinet. Right now, that role is held by 27-year-old Karoline Leavitt. Amid the Trump administration's ongoing legal and cultural battle with Harvard University over the federal funding it receives, Leavitt appeared on Fox News to discuss the situation with Sean Hannity. President Trump is moving to cancel all of the university's federal funding. In a clip that's been viewed over 4.6 million times, Leavitt attempts to diss Harvard as a "woke" leftist institution of higher education (the oldest and most revered in the country, I might add). She says that President Donald Trump is "more interested in giving that taxpayer money to trade schools and programs and state schools where they are promoting American values, but most importantly, educating the next generation based on skills that we need in our economy and our society." Leavitt then slips up: "Apprentinships, electricians, plumbers." Did you catch that? She meant "apprenticeships." Related: 18 Major Global Events That American Media Is Ignoring Right Now, And Why They Actually Matter To Us "We need more of those in our country and less LGBTQ graduate majors from Harvard University, and that's what this administration's position is," she says. Leavitt concludes, "And we also are not gonna tolerate the illegal criminal antisemitic behavior that we saw take place at Harvard and many other college campuses across the country," referencing the wave of pro-Palestine protests and calls for colleges to divest from Israel. If you're wondering what on earth an "LGBTQ graduate major" is, I'm right there with you. People who saw the clip on Twitter felt the same way. "Beyond parody," a Republicans against Trump account posted. Related: "MAGAs Are The Dumbest People On This Planet": 26 Tweets About The Sad State Of Politics This Week Another person pointed out Leavitt's linguistic slip. "Rule #1: if you're going to try to make the case that we need less formal education in this country, make sure you don't say, 'apprentinships' when you mean to say 'apprenticeships'. Thank you," they wrote. Some people joked about Trump and his cabinet shirking off their college-educated lawyers... ...and doctors. Other people took it a little more seriously. "This is a culture war soundbite designed to inflame, not inform," this person wrote. "Devaluing scholars, because they are LGBTQ, reveals more about Leavitt's insecurity than our educational priorities." "Just wait till she finds out that electricians and plumbers can be TOO!!!!!" someone wrote. Of course, some people were in support of Leavitt's comments. But a whooooole lot weren't. You can watch the full clip here. @atrupar / Fox / X / Via What do you think? Let us know in the comments. Also in In the News: An Ad Against Far-Right Voters Is Going Viral For Being Both Terrifying And (Kinda) Accurate Also in In the News: Miss USA's 2024 "National Costume" Has Been Revealed, And It's Obviously An Interesting Choice Also in In the News: One Body Language Expert Spotted Something Very Telling When Donald Trump "Held His Own Hand" At His Recent Press Conference
